Giyani community conversation

July 28, 2008 – Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) Dialogue Programme community conversations series returned to Giyani for a second year on July 2, 2008.

While last year’s conversation in November had involved Giyani’s youth, between 16 and 24 years old, this year’s conversation encouraged participants from all age groups to attend the meeting.

It was perhaps a reflection of the effectiveness of last year’s conversation that one of the major issues highlighted by the youth was a need for the older generation to become more involved in the community, particularly when it came to discussing sex with their children.

The younger generation felt that their inability to discuss sex with their parents put them at risk of other influences that often landed them in potentially risky sexual situations.

About Giyani

Giyani, which falls within the Mopani District Municipality in Limpopo province, is characterised by mainly rural conditions and is geographically distant from the economic centres of the Limpopo province and those situated in the rest of South Africa.

Of the over half-a-million people in Giyani’s 15 to 65-year-old population, 52.2% are not economically active. High unemployment and extreme poverty are prevalent in the area. Key sectors of the local economy are manufacturing, trade, catering, government, finance, transport, communications and agriculture. The labour force in Giyani consists of a small percentage of skilled and semi-skilled labour, with a large percentage of unskilled people.

Meaning “a place where people dance” and “a land of the friendly people” in Tsonga, Giyani has a rich cultural history, with royal families dating as far back as 1822.

Speaking freely

With 370 people flooding into the community hall, key facilitator Edwin Maheso helped the community to establish the ground rules for the four-hour-long conversation.

The aim of these ground rules in all the Community Conversations is to encourage people of the community to speak freely about the common problems that they face.

The rules are designed to create a safe space in which people can speak freely. In so doing, the conversation lays the platform for the community to move towards finding equitable solutions to their problems.

In Giyani, one of the ground rules suggested by a participant was that “no one [was] to be intimidated when they speak,” from which one can infer that there is still a great deal of stigmatisation surrounding the issue of HIV/AIDS.

This positive reaction suggests that there are members of the community, who, given the opportunity, would like to discuss HIV/AIDS and find solutions to prevent the spread of the virus within the Giyani community.

Opening up

Having laid the ground rules, the participants went through the process of “counting your losses”.  Designed as a way getting the community to reflect individually on HIV, this tool asks the participants to think about how HIV has affected them personally.

Each member of the audience is asked to pick up one stone for every person they’ve lost to HIV. It’s an emotional experience and the audience and facilitators were all in tears before the exercise was completed.

Despite the emotional trauma, this was an excellent way of introducing the next part of the community conversation main methodology, “telling stories”.

The community conversations methodology is based on the Community Capacity Enhancement Programme (CCEP) and the storytelling tool encourages people involved in the conversation to recount personal experiences of HIV/AIDS – often harrowing stories that highlight the stigma that still surrounds this syndrome.

Recounting the tales and sharing the pain brings the community together, highlights the burning issues being faced by the community and providing the impetus to do something about these issues.

The community of Giyani agreed that their strongest concern was a lack of support. They said that their community needed to pull together and try to help each other if anything was going to be done about dealing with HIV/AIDS. They added that cultural beliefs should be utilised to create better communication between parents and their children, particularly about sex.

There are a number of challenges facing Giyani. There are still a number of misleading perceptions and practices in Giyani: some people believe that HIV is an automatic death sentence; a number of parents believe that they shouldn’t discuss sex with their children; there is a shared sentiment among many of the young people who attended the conversation that being HIV-positive should be punishable; and young women in their teens are often groomed for marriage by either their parents or a neighbour. This practice occurs because raising a good future wife is seen as a praiseworthy achievement. Poverty and intergenerational relationships are also problems being experienced by the community.

Engaging partners

A committee was elected consisting of representatives from each of the community groups. Two members from among the women, one from the men and two youths were nominated to represent the community in addressing social issues, especially to do with HIV/AIDS. These members, along with a selected support task team from the Department of Health (Morris Baloyi), Department of Social Services (Aubrey Hlongwane), youth and other members, now form the action committee of Giyani.

Each member of the committee was allocated certain roles and responsibilities along with a time frame in which to complete their designated tasks.

Meetings were set up with local stakeholders to garner their support and the committee was encouraged to provide ongoing feedback to the community in order to keep them abreast of progress the committee was making.